Word: beckett
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...five supreme 20th century dramatists, Pirandello, Shaw, O'Neill, and Brecht are dead. Only Beckett remains, slowly adding masterpiece to masterpiece...
...Theatre Company of Boston is to be lauded for offering, if for only one week, the local premiere of Beckett's next-to-latest play, Happy Days (1961). And it was luckily able to obtain the services of Ruth White, who originated the main role at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York, and whose virtuosity in it was one of the most stunning achievements of the 1961-62 season...
...playwriting Beckett thrives on frugality and restraint. He tends to use a small cast, to observe the classical unities, and then to set up further obstacles for himself. Now he uses a mute character, now just one man and a tape-recorder; now he confines one character to a wheelchair and two others inside ashcans, now he does away with spoken words entirely. In his latest work, simply called Play (1963), the three characters are ensconced in big white urns with only their heads visible...
...Although Beckett's Waiting for Godot is--despite most critics--an optimistic work, the title of Happy Days is blatantly ironic. Throughout the play, the outlook--both literal and figurative--is bleak. Death and annihilation are imminent. The whole work is a study in irony--and the irony, in both word and action, is heightened by the ludicrous situational context. And it is ludicrous. In spite of all the pathos and the spectre of death. Happy Days is on balance a comedy. Many of Winnie's actions are highly funny, and she is by no means reluctant to crack puns...
Independent Whim. Ulm's particular specialty has been the theater of the absurd, and absurdity-:the existentialist-born notion that only the moment matters and the moment is meaningless -reaches great heights in Ulm, so great in fact that writers like Beckett, Jean Genet (The Blacks) and Eugene lonesco (The Bald Soprano) are actually regarded as "old fuddy-duddies" by some residents. Beckett's new Play, in their view, has a plot and is therefore blighted...